Comment by jmartrican
10 hours ago
What if we remove the stigma of authors using AI. We say, have at it, use all the AI you want. What then? The market is still finite. The authors are still competing with each other. They will still have to be good at creating compelling books that people want to read. Will the whole thing just blow over and AI would be "just another tool" that authors use to get their work out?
Discoverability starts to break for new authors when more new books are published each day than humans on the earth.
Established authors have the name recognition to compete as you say.
This has happened with other accelerants in various media/fields:
1. easy access to video recording and editing equipment has made it a lot easier to produce videos on sites like YouTube;
2. easy access to audio recording and editing (Audacity, etc.) has made it a lot easier to produce podcasts and other audio content (via LibriVox, Apple Podcasts, etc.);
3. easy access to writing software and self-publishing (Amazon, fan fiction sites, blogging platforms) has made it a lot easier to produce stories and books;
4. easy access to game engines and tools (Unity, Unreal, Godot, Twine, RenPy, etc.) have made it a lot easier to produce games.
Yes, and as Howey explains in TFA those things might be good for consumers and creators who create for fun, but they are not good for people who create in order to earn a living.
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What if other LLMs were charged to read the work as well? And those other LLMs were actually in the persona of aspiring authors hoping to learn so they can later sell their work?
There's an entire potential economy there without humans necessarily involved at all, kind of busted by recent Anthropic precedent admittedly.
AI destroys your writing voice. There are authors who I enjoy not only because they write a compelling story, but they do so in such a way that is lyrically enjoyable. Engineers fall into the trap of thinking that if the slop machine emits the Internet-average sentence to describe a character’s actions, then it will suffice for all audiences and works of literature. “Add more adjectives and flowery language” will only net you a novel that reeks of cheap perfume. I guess we’ve lumped all of this under “taste” these days, but that’s what the AI author lacks. Without it, it’s probably going to be fine for producing summer beach reads (which could be quite lucrative!), but it needs to escape the mean it was trained on to be a truly unique, compelling voice.
You are ultimately stating that there's something unique about human minds that cannot be replicated by machines. It may be so, or not.
I think I was fairly clear that I’m talking about these machines, not all machines that exist or could exist. If I wasn’t, please read “AI” as “state of the art LLMs as they exist today.”
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As long as we add the stigma of them getting paid for their AI's effort too.
Then it could absolutely work.
Why would there need to be a stigma for getting paid based on a tool they used?
Do other authors have a stigma for using a word processor instead of a typewriter?
Artist have a stigma for using photoshop instead of canvas?
> Why would there need to be a stigma for getting paid based on a tool they used?
Is it being used a tool, or is it being used as a ghostwriter? There is often stigma attached to that when done by humans.
> Artist have a stigma for using photoshop instead of canvas?
Yes, that used to very much be the case. Now it is often considered a different form of expression, so loses a lot of the stigma mostly by not pretending to be what those looking down on it are comparing it to.
Similar in the debate between CGI and practical effects.
Perhaps if AI-backed authors are willing to have their work classed as a different type of writing they can skip by the comparison-stigma too?
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The issue is that word processors and photoshop replace the traditional technique of art. AI replaces the expression of art. Since the invention of the camera made representation trivial, the art community has moved towards viewing expression as the soul of art.
Surely having the idea and curating the result actually is work?
And pricing is determined by what someone else will pay for something, so if people want to read it and the author is charging for it . . . that's up to them if they want to make a trade about it.
The odd thing is this attempt at gatekeeping what other people value.
> pricing is determined by what someone else will pay for something
That’s so reductive that even Keynes would probably take issue.
Discoverability is the axis of competition in this context, not price. The market has not effectively found out how to identify quality in order to price it, so externalities rule instead: pre-existing authors with recognizable names, whatever genre publishers like at a given moment (famously disconnected from what people actually want to buy), how many energy drinks a crabby editor has had by the time they get to your manuscript, and so on.
Search engine and recommendation systems were supposed to ameliorate those externalities. They didn’t.
Price is determined by what someone is willing to pay but value isn't. If the value from art comes from expression, then LLMs directly attack the core value of art.
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That sounds to me like the most reasonable attitude. If a story is compelling for a certain person, why care about how it was created?
Part of the appeal of literature generally and the novel in particular is that it provides you with an incredibly intimate connection to the subjectivity of another person, though they may be long dead, or the speaker of another language, or from a far away part of the world that you would never be able to visit yourself.
I would argue that a story can mainly provide a connection with your own subjectivity. If it moves something in you, that's what mainly matters.
If your goal by reading is too learn about the subjectivity of another real person, then yes, read human authors. You said it, that's it's part of what a book can offer, but there can be other reasons for reading
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This mindset is called "death of the author" [1] and the quick summary is that the author's intent doesn't matter. Most book people I know disagree with it.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Author
What does matter? That's completely subjective. If the intent of the author matters to you, then, to you, it does.
There's not an abstract "not mattering of the intent of the author" independent of different people with certain values.
You could say that the intent of the author is the number one issue that matters. That's completely subjective, that's just, like, your opinion, man.